Web Based Supplementary Material for Chapter 1

Cartwright, Evolution and Human Behaviour, Palgrave 2016

WEB BASED SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL FOR CHAPTER 1

CONTENT OF THIS SECTION

1.1The study of animal behaviour.
1.1.1 Comparative psychology and ethology: the 19th-century origins
1.1.2 Interactions between comparative psychology and ethology

1.2Evolution and theories of human behaviour: Darwin and after

1.2.1Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)

1.2.2Evolution in America: Morgan, Baldwin and James

1.2.3 Galton and the rise of the eugenics movement

1.3The triumph of culture

1.3.1Franz Boas

1.3.2The revolt against eugenics

1.3.3Behaviourism as an alternative resting place

1.3.4The “cognitive revolution” and other challenges to behaviourism

1.1 The study of animal behaviour

The application of evolutionary ideas to human behaviour grew in part out of the study of animal behaviour and it is worth tracing these roots. A number of disciplines have laid claim to providing an understanding of animal behaviour, including ethology, comparative psychology, behavioural ecology and, emerging in the 1970s, sociobiology. The problem for the historian is that these terms were not always precisely defined and the disciplines frequently overlapped. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider the origins of comparative psychology and ethology together.

1.1.1Comparative psychology and ethology: the 19th-century origins

Comparative psychology

For Darwin, it was clear and indisputable that all life on earth had evolved from lowly origins. Behaviour, morphology and physiology had all been shaped by the twin forces of natural and sexual selection. In this sense, Darwin subscribed to what can be called ‘psychoneural monism’ – the idea that mind and body are not separate entities. Scientific naturalism, in accounting for life and its origins, had seemed finally to square the circle. In respect of man, Wallace agreed with Darwin that in bodily structure, humans had descended from an ancestor common to man and the anthropoid apes, but he objected to the view that natural selection could also explain man’s mental faculties. Darwin was, however, determined to push through his programme. He stressed the essential unity between animal and human minds, noting that ‘there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties’ (Darwin, 1871, p. 446).

It was Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, that more than any other book acted as a spur to the study of both ethology and comparative psychology. In this work, Darwin, in the traditions of the day, described the behaviour of animals using terms that were extrapolated from the mental life of humans. For Darwin, no human mental function was unique: the way to understand human minds was by invoking processes found in the minds of other animals. Darwin was quite clear that instincts were also adaptations: if they varied a little between individuals, and he thought they did, then natural selection had something to act upon. Although he observed the behaviour of his pets, animals at the zoo and his children, Darwin made few experiments of his own on animal behaviour and for the most part relied upon anecdotal information given to him by naturalists, zoo-keepers and other correspondents. With hindsight, the anecdotal approach appears fatally flawed. Darwin’s lasting contribution to the ethological approach was, however, to provide an evolutionary framework to the study of behaviour, and to highlight the value of observing animals in their natural settings.

Figure 1.1 George John Romanes FRS ( 1848 – 1894)

Romanes was a Canadian-born English evolutionary biologist and physiologist who was strongly associated with the anecdotalist school of animal behaviour suggesting that humans and non-human animals share similar cognitive and emotional process and mechanisms. Photograph by Elliott & Fry.

There were many who sympathised with the misgivings of Wallace and, to defend Darwin’s approach, there grew up what has been called the ‘anecdotal movement’ (Dewsbury, 1984). Anecdotalists such as George John Romanes were so called because they relied upon reports and unsystematic observations of animal behaviour to provide an empirical base for their writings. To demonstrate the continuity between animal and human minds, it was thought necessary to show that animals could reason, show complex forms of social behaviour and display human-like emotions. Romanes is important to the history of animal psychology in the sense that it was the reaction against these ideas that was to shape future developments. In his book Mental Evolution in Man (1888), Romanes advanced the doctrine of levels of development that could be expressed on a numerical scale. In this system, humans were born at level 16, reaching the level of insects at 10 weeks and that of dogs and the great apes at about 15 months. Romanes also suggested that human emotions were common to other animals according to the complexity involved. Fish, for example, he thought capable of experiencing jealousy and anger, birds pride and resentment, and apes shame and remorse (Romanes, 1887, 1888). But Romanes was as much a Lamarckian as a Darwinist in his thinking, and despite his background in physiology he conducted few, if any, controlled experiments on animals. Like Herbert Spencer he thought that habits could become fixed as instincts. In the end he resorted to a sort of Lamarckian progressivism in which animal minds were viewed as evolving towards a human type of intelligence.

In 1894, the year that Romanes died, two books were published that were pivotal in defining the way ahead. The first was Wilhelm Wundt’s Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, in which Wundt (1832–1920) criticised the anecdotal method of Romanes. The second book, perhaps more significant, was An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1894) by Conwy Lloyd Morgan (1852–1936). Morgan was a pioneer of comparative psychology and did much to establish the scientific credentials of the emerging discipline and place it on an evolutionary basis.He was one of the first comparative psychologists to employ controlled experiments. He observed the behavioural development of young chicks, for example, and recorded the effect of environmental changes on their behaviour. By such experiments he came to the conclusion that the anthropomorphic ideas of the Darwin- Romanes school of anecdotalism were fatally flawed.

He became the first scientist to be elected to the Royal Society of Great Britain for work in psychology. In this book, Morgan rejected the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits and outlined his famous canon:

In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale. (Lloyd Morgan, 1894, p. 53)

Morgan’s canon is of course a sort of law of parsimony in the style of what is called Occam’s razor; that is, where two explanations are possible, we choose the simplest and resist entertaining unnecessary hypotheses. In this instance, scientists were urged to avoid interpreting animal behaviour in terms of the thoughts and feelings experienced by humans. The premises underlying Morgan’s canon were surprisingly modern in their conception and firmly based on evolutionary logic. Morgan thought that relatively few innate traits, coupled with an inherent learning process (such as the ability to establish links between cause and effects), could yield quite complex forms of behaviour. Therefore, he reasoned, why assume the evolution of complex and costly behavioural processes when simpler and cheap ones would suffice (Plotkin, 2004).

Many of the early comparative psychologists were concerned with learning. Important and pioneering work in trial and error learning was conducted by the American Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949). A typical experimental arrangement set up by Thorndike was that an animal would receive a reward for a type of behaviour that was initially discovered accidentally. The time taken to repeat the behaviour was taken as an indication of learning. Predictably, behaviours that met with favourable consequences for the animal were learnt quickly. This learning process was termed ‘operant conditioning’, and the acceleration of learning through positive reward became known as the law of effect. After the first World War, Thorndike became almost exclusively concerned with human psychology. In rejecting the anecdotal approach of Romanes and moving towards laboratory studies of caged animals, Thorndike and others were beginning a trend that was to dominate comparative psychology for the next 50 years.

Ethology

The word ‘ethology’ is derived from the Greek word ethos meaning character or trait. In Britain, there was a long and, by the late 18th century, popular tradition of natural history involving the observation and documentation of the behaviour of animals. However, the science of ethology probably began in France, its early pioneers including Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), Etienne Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) and Alfred Giard (1846–1908). In contemporary biology, the name of Lamarck is still well known as that of someone who provided the only serious rival to the mechanism of natural selection as a way of accounting for the preservation of favoured traits. In 1809, the year in which Darwin was born, Lamarck published Philosophie Zoologique, in which he advanced the view that species could change over time to new species (transmutationism). One mechanism for such changes that Lamarck suggested was the idea that organisms could, through their own efforts, modify their form, and these modifications could be passed to the next generation. Although this was a small part of Lamarck’s entire theory, the notion that acquired characters can be inherited has become indelibly associated with his name (see Chapter 2). Lamarck made few friends among French scientists. He acquired a reputation for publishing inaccurate weather forecasts, which did his career no good; more tellingly, his views on biology were denigrated by the French anatomist George Cuvier (1769–1837). Lamarck died blind and poor in 1829.

In the late 19th century, the concerns of comparative psychology and ethology overlapped, and the careers of some scientists straddled what were only later to become divergent disciplines. Lloyd Morgan, for example, is often cited as being one of the founding fathers of both ethology and comparative psychology. It was during the 20th century that differences in training, methodologies and even fundamental assumptions about the nature of animals led to a schism.

1.1.2Interactions between comparative psychology and ethology

Between 1950 and 1970, there were a variety of approaches to the study of animal behaviour, although ethology and comparative psychology were the dominant players. The exact boundaries of these disciplines and the extent of their interactions were often more complex than is conveyed by a simple ‘warfare model’. There was, however, a frank exchange of critical comments and an atmosphere of intellectual rivalry. The ethologists often identified the whole of comparative psychology with the extreme environmentalism of Watson’s later years. They saw comparative psychology as a discipline obsessed with what rats do in mazes, bereft of a unifying theory and ignorant of the adaptive and evolutionary basis for behaviour. In return, psychologists saw ethology as lacking in scientific rigour, employing dubious concepts such as innateness and burdened by unsubstantiated models.

An outsider looking into this mêlée would also note that Lorenz and Tinbergen achieved a rapport with the reading public by writing fluent and popular works. In contrast, comparative psychology appeared to be more introspective and plagued with self-doubt. As late as 1984, the comparative psychologist Dewsbury lamented that ‘we seem to suffer an identity crisis’ (Dewsbury, 1984, p. 6). Correspondingly, some of the harshest portrayals of comparative psychology came from the psychologists themselves. It seemed to be a discipline set on a course for self-destruction. In a classic paper entitled ‘The snark was a boojum’, Beach (1950) demonstrated how, between 1911 and 1945, the output of research on animal behaviour from the perspective of comparative psychology had increased while the number of species actually studied had dwindled. By 1948, the vast majority of articles in this field was concerned with one single species, the Norway rat, and was dominated by reports of learning and conditioning experiments. It was as if, as Lorenz complained, the word ‘comparative’ was a sham.

The fondness for the Norway rat stood in stark contrast to the much wider diversity of organisms studied by the ethologists. There were other characteristic differences too: comparative psychology tended to find a natural home in North America whilst ethology was more popular in Europe; and comparative psychologists tended to have a background in psychology whilst ethologists came from zoological backgrounds.

Further surveys involving analyses of the content of journals, in the style of Beach, were conducted at regular intervals after 1950. In the 1970s, several observers concluded that the earlier scenario outlined by Beach, of a subject blinkered by its own concern with a few species, was still very much in evidence (Scott, 1973; Lown, 1975). To be fair to comparative psychology, this narrowness of focus was a conscious decision and did not overly concern its practitioners. They were searching for universal laws of behaviour that, once established for any one species, could be applied to others. However, the day that such laws could be transferred to illuminate human behaviour seemed to recede as fast as it was chased.

By the late 1970s, comparative psychology was in a sorry state. The field seemed to suffer a crisis of confidence, faced the ignominy of being identified (however unjustly) with a discredited behaviourism, and the epithet ‘comparative’ sounded alarmingly hollow. The neglect of an adaptive approach to behaviour, as well as an under appreciation of phylogenic differences in learning and intelligence, was increasingly seen as a damaging shortcoming. In 1984, Dewsbury wrote a sustained defence of the discipline that challenged a number of misconceptions and tried to give it a respectable history (Dewsbury, 1984), but even then it was clear that the study of behaviour was moving in radically new directions. The attempt to patch up the image of psychology contrasted sharply with the hybrid vigour demonstrated by the merger of ethology and ecology to yield behavioural ecology and sociobiology.

A rapprochement was eventually established between ethology and comparative psychology, and each side learned valuable lessons from the other. Two people in particular who sought to bridge the disciplines and effect a reconciliation were the American psychologist Donald Dewsbury and the Cambridge ethologist Robert Hinde. In 1982, Hinde took a sanguine view and concluded that, despite a few remaining differences, the two approaches had broadened in their concerns and ‘on the whole the distinction between the two groups barely exists’ (Hinde, 1982, p. 187). Dewsbury was also, in 1990, calling for reconciliation between causative and functional (adaptive) approaches to behaviour. By this time, behavioural ecology, and sociobiology in particular, were well on the way to exploiting new insights into the adaptive basis of behaviour generated by concepts such as parental investment, reciprocal altruism, kin selection theory and a revival of Darwin’s own theory of sexual selection. Dewsbury (1990) in fact complained that the concentration on the functional approach threatened to imbalance the study of behaviour.

Before examining the remarkable efflorescence of ideas associated with this movement, we will examine the background of applying evolutionary ideas to human behaviour, for it is precisely in this area that behavioural ecology and sociobiology succeeded in bridging the human–animal divide where comparative psychology failed.

1.2Evolution and theories of human behaviour: Darwin and after

1.2.1 Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)

Herbert Spencer, philosopher and critic, was a contemporary of Darwin and someone equally keen to push forward the programme of scientific naturalism. In his book Principles of Biology (1864) Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe the Darwinian process of natural selection. It was this phrase that Darwin borrowed from Spencer and used in his fifth edition (1869) of the Origin.

Spencer’s curiosity in evolution was first aroused when he stumbled across fossils in his first career as a civil engineer. In 1840, he read Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), a work that contained a discussion of Lamarck’s evolutionary ideas, and thereafter became attracted to Lamarckian notions of the evolutionary process. Spencer’s thinking on evolution applied to the human psyche came to fruition in 1855 when he published his Principles of Psychology. The strain of completing this work led him to suffer a nervous breakdown that left him incapacitated for about 18 months; modern readers who wish to plough through Spencer’s writings might be warned of a similar risk. In this book, Spencer reasoned that Lamarckian processes could have led to modern human faculties. The love of liberty, for example, may have originated in the fear that animals show when restrained. This then evolved to a political commitment whereby individuals seek liberty for themselves and others as a principle. It was after reading Darwin’s Origin of Species that Spencer coined the famous phrase “survival of the fittest” - a shorthand for the theory of natural which first appeared in print in Spencer’s Book Principles of Biology in 1864. Darwin was quite taken with the phrase and wrote to Wallace that it avoided the misunderstanding (latent in the term natural selection) that nature makes a conscious choice. Darwin first used the term himself in the 5th edition of The Origin published in 1869. Ever since, however, biologists have had to point out that “fittest” does not mean “in good shape” but simply those organisms, by virtue of their adaptations, who leave most offspring. They have also had to spend a lot of time demonstrating that it is not simply a tautology (see (Paul, 1988) for an interesting history of this phrase).

What is also significant is that Spencer advanced a view of the human mind, a sort of evolutionary Kantism, that he thought would provide a solution to the age-old controversy between the disciples of Kant and Locke. For Locke, the human mind is essentially structured by experience: we are born with a blank slate, a tabula rasa, upon which experience scribes. In this empiricist conception of the mind, there are few inherent specific structures or mechanisms. There is a congruence between our mind, our knowledge and the world itself because experience has shaped for us our perceptual categories and modes of perception. Kant, however, held that the human mind is provided at birth with a priori categories or inherent specialised mechanisms (such as Euclidean geometry and notions of space and time) that structure the world for us. This philosophical divide between the views of Locke and Kant was revived in the mid-19th century by debates between J. S. Mill and William Whewell, the former advocating an inductive view of knowledge in the manner of Locke, and the latter espousing a more Kantian position.